Why Obama Shouldn’t Write James Holmes Out of History

Among the snippets of depressing news from Aurora, Colorado: President Obama, during his visit on Sunday, reportedly agreed to a request from some of the victims’ families not to mention the name of the alleged shooter, James Holmes, who appeared in court earlier today, his shaggy hair dyed orange.

On a personal level, the attempt to deny Holmes more publicity was perfectly understandable. Who can imagine what suffering and anguish the victims’ families are going through, or the hatred and anger they must feel toward Holmes? Having mercilessly snuffed out twelve lives, as he is alleged to have done, why shouldn’t he be declared a non-person? Actually, I can think of at least two good reasons.

First, wishing Holmes away won’t do any good. It might well do harm. Arguably, the problem with deranged mass killers isn’t that they get too much publicity; it’s that they get too little. Generally, after a few weeks or months, many people forget their names; after a few years, almost everybody has forgotten them. Both they and their victims fade into obscurity and the gun violence continues.

How did you do? If you correctly named Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden, the Jonesboro middle-school shooters, or even Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine High School shooters, and Seung Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech killer, you did better than me. If you got some of the others, too, you must have been reading up on the history of mass shootings, which, as we all know, is more than ample.

That’s part of the problem. In any other country, Johnson and Golden and Cho would be household names—instantly recognizable symbols of all that’s wrong with the gun laws, the gun lobby, and a political system that fails to confront them. The demonization of crazed shooters can serve a political purpose: personalizing the debate engages the public and enables politicians to face down the gun lobby. In Britain, the name Michael Ryan—he shot sixteen people in 1987—is associated with a ban on semi-automatic weapons. In Canada, the name Marc Lépine—he shot fourteen women in 1989—is tied to gun laws that required gun owners to undergo a thorough background check, register their weapons, and take a course in firearms safety.

Here, then, is the second and most important reason we shouldn’t erase Holmes from the record. As long as his name and his heinous acts live on in the public consciousness, there may be some chance of reform. Admittedly, it’s a slim chance, (my colleague Adam Gopnik is right about that and much else) but that’s better than nothing.

Of course, any push for meaningful restrictions on the gun trade will demand the full and vigorous support of the President. Rather than refusing to say “James Holmes,” Obama would surely be doing the victims’ families, and the rest of us, a much greater service if he seized upon this terrible story and used it to educate Americans about the consequences of statutes that allowed a twenty-four-year-old graduate-school dropout to order, online, some three thousand rounds of ammunition for his Bushmaster AR 15 assault rifle, another three thousand rounds for his handgun, and three hundred and fifty shells for his shotgun. Such an exercise on Obama’s part would befit the word “Presidential.”

It isn’t going to happen, though. On Sunday, while the President was in Colorado, Jay Carney, a White House spokesman, said that the White House won’t be pushing for any new gun laws. On Monday morning, David Axelrod tried to change the news narrative back to Mitt Romney’s problems, banging on about the G.O.P. candidate’s refusal to release records related to the Salt Lake City Olympics. “When it comes to secrecy, Mitt takes the gold!,” Axelrod tweeted.

You might say, Fair enough, this is simply a matter of realpolitik. Obama and many other Democrats decided long ago that the cost of taking on the gun lobby was too high to be justified. For years now, they have avoided the subject whenever they could. Take the federal ban on the type of assault rifle that Holmes used, which expired in 2004. Even during Obama’s first term, when his party had a majority in both houses of Congress, he made no real effort to restore it.

Perhaps that was the right decision politically, although for the life of me I can’t see what it gained the Administration. In 2010, did the Tea Party temper its criticisms of Obama because he had allowed its members to keep their AR-15s and AK-47s? Not that I recall. But in many Democratic circles, not just the Obama campaign, it is still taken as given that engaging with the Republicans on the gun laws is tantamount to committing political suicide.

Surely, though, there are limits to this craven attitude. Yes, politics is a dirty business that calls for dirty compromises—especially when you are a President with low approval ratings running for reëlection against a party that largely bases its appeal on emotional mantras about God, guns, and taxes. But in being silent even about the name of the perpetrator of a massacre of this nature, Obama is going too far. America’s outrageous gun laws demand more than hastily agreed upon gestures of sympathy for the victims of the commerce they support. They demand courage, honesty, and a public reckoning. In this instance, though, the President and his advisers appear to be falling back upon the politics of denial.